Page:On the Coromandel Coast.djvu/57

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wrong opinion. 'But he is not infallible,' concluded Philip Gell.

At that time there was a notable group of boys at the school, who were afterwards to distinguish themselves in various spheres of action. A small volume called 'Memorials of Bishop Gell,' printed at the press belonging to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Madras (1905), contains some of Bishop Gell's letters. One, written in reply to an invitation from Lord Sandhurst to a Rugby dinner held in Bombay, July 30, 1898, described his schoolfellows thus :-

'I went to Rugby at the beginning of 1834 and left in the middle of 1839. Arnold's two most distinguished pupils finished their school course at the end of my first half. Stanley, to fulfil a brilliant career at Oxford, then to become Canon of Canterbury and, in due time, Dean of Westminster, and a faithful writer of history and essays; and Vaughan, after a no less brilliant career at Cambridge, to be Headmaster of Harrow, and afterwards Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff, and a no less fruitful composer of excellent sermons. Other Rugbeians of my day who distinguished themselves were Clough, the poet; Hughes the author of the popular book "Tom Brown"; Fox, the first Rugby missionary, the founder, with his colleague Noble, of the C.M.S. Mission to the eighteen million Telugus in Eastern India. His career was a brief one of a few years between 1840 and 1850. But the mission he began grew, and is now represented by fourteen European clergy and seventeen Telugus. Then, too, there was Bradley, now Stanley's successor, as Dean of Westminster, and Matthew Arnold of literary celebrity, eldest son of the great Headmaster.

'Several came out to India : Seton-Karr, who rose to high office in Calcutta; Sherer of the North-West Provinces, a pleasant writer of Indian reminiscences;